"

Multiply this colonel by six hundred thousand, and the product is the
pressure of the functionaries of all sorts--military, political, civil,
administrative, ecclesiastical, judicial, fiscal, municipal,
scholastic, commercial, and consular--throughout France, on the
soldier, the citizen, and the peasant. Add, as we have above pointed
out, the fictitious communist Jacquerie and the real Bonapartist
terrorism, the government imposing by phantasmagoria on the weak, and
by dictatorship on the refractory, and brandishing two terrors
together. It would require a special volume to relate, expose, and
develop the innumerable details of that immense extortion of
signatures, which is called "the vote of the 20th of December."

The vote of the 20th of December prostrated the honour, the initiative,
the intelligence, and the moral life of the nation. France went to that
vote as sheep go to the slaughter-house.

Let us proceed.

Second. _That the vote must be intelligent._

Here is an elementary proposition. Where there is no liberty of the
press, there is no vote. The liberty of the press is the condition
_sine qua non_, of universal suffrage. Every ballot cast in the absence
of liberty of the press is void _ab initio_. Liberty of the press
involves, as necessary corollaries, liberty of meeting, liberty of
publishing, liberty of distributing information, all the liberties
engendered by the right--antedating all other rights--of informing
one's self before voting. To vote is to steer; to vote is to judge. Can
one imagine a blind pilot at the helm? Can one imagine a judge with his
ears stuffed and his eyes put out? Liberty, then,--liberty to inform
one's self by every means, by inquiry, by the press, by speech, by
discussion,--this is the express guarantee, the condition of being, of
universal suffrage. In order that a thing may be done validly, it must
be done knowingly. Where there is no torch, there is no binding act.

These are axioms: outside of these axioms, all is _ipso facto_ null.

Now, let us see: did M. Bonaparte, in his ballot of the 20th of
December, obey these axioms? Did he fulfil the conditions of free
press, free meetings, free tribune, free advertising, free inquiry. The
answer is an immense shout of laughter, even from the Elysee.

Thus you are yourself compelled to admit that it was thus that
"universal suffrage" was exercised.

What! I know nothing of what is going on: men have been killed,
slaughte